The gymnasium at Loyalist Collegiate was bustling with busy seed-gatherers on Saturday.

The Kingston Area Seed System Initiative (KASSI) Seedy Saturday event was a big hit, as usual, and offered local and regional seed producers and area gardeners a chance to connect before the start to the growing season.

Stacey Hubbs is from Prince Edward County. She owns and operates Edible Antiques, a small heirloom seed company. She’s a self-described vegetable lover and “tomato dork.”

“I have 76 varieties [of tomatoes] that I grow myself, and they’re my close personal friends,” she said with a smile.

Hubbs began her seed business in 2012. Before that, she spent several years working at Vicki’s Veggies in Prince Edward County.

“She got me into growing heirlooms for food, and I wanted to take it to the next level and start growing for seed,” Hubbs said.

Her collection of heirloom tomatoes at 76 strong, Hubbs realized that not everyone would focus on keeping such a range of diversity going.

“I want these guys to stick around for a while,” she said. “I realized when I was working there that a lot of my favourite tomatoes would die off and I wouldn’t be able to find them anymore. It becomes important to keep your friends around, if you want to eat them!”

On a grander scale, Hubbs believes seed saving is an important endeavour for many reasons.

“One reason is local adaptation. A lot of people had flooding last year and drought the year before. We’re saving local seeds that can survive our local weather. People need tough seeds that are going to grow them food, and seeds that are familiar with growing in this environment.”

Smalltime seed producers are an answer to growing concerns about seed security and diversity in a sector that continues to become industrially commercialized.

Kathy Rothermel is the chair of KASSI. She said there’s been a rise in the past decade of small seed companies looking to fill the gap that industrial seed producers have left in the market.

“There’s some unintended consequences of the industrial model,” Rothermel said. “One of them is seed patenting.”

Seeds are being developed and patented as intellectual property, and that model doesn’t work well for the future of seed saving, in Rothermel’s opinion.

“That means I can’t buy that seed and grow it out and save seed. I can’t grow it out and save seed and sell it, and I can’t grow that out and save seed and use it for any research purposes,” Rothermel explained. “The problem is that they’re patenting that material so that researchers at universities cannot use it. That’s limiting choices, and because [the companies] are so large, there are a lot of varieties that aren’t commercially viable.”

Industrial seed producers who offer strains of less-popular vegetables, for instance, may stop offering those in their line of products if they don’t sell well.

“If I only sell 50 packets of this bean, I won’t offer it next year. We’ve lost a huge amount of genetic diversity, which makes our system weaker,” she said.

Local and regional seed savers and producers who were on hand at the Seedy Saturday event do have commercial interests, as small business owners. But Rothermel said their interests go beyond simply making a living.

“There seems to be this growing need and desire for self-sufficiency and understanding that our system is weakening, and there is going to be a point where it’s going to crash,” she said. “There’s a huge fight happening between the industrial model and the organic model. It’s two very different ways of looking at the world. It’s about modifying life with the patent part of it, and genetic modification.”

Small seed savers and producers are taking a proactive approach to their protest against industrialized seed production.

“This is the alternative. It’s great to say, ‘These guys are wrong, they shouldn’t be doing this.’ But what’s the alternative?” Rothermel said. “We see people saying, ‘We can be the alternative. We can do things a different way.’”

Hubbs said the increased interest in locally produced seeds is a great thing.

“A lot of people are starting to really wonder where their seeds are coming from, and it’s really nice,” Hubbs said. “A couple of years ago there was a lot more explaining to do than there is now. People understand when they come to my table that I’m a seed company, and they buy seeds.”